How to do Hierarchical Heteroskedastic Sparse GPs in GPflow? - gpflow

Is is possible to model a general trend from a population using GPflow and also have individual predictions, as in Hensman et al?
Specifically, I am trying to fit spatial data from a bunch of individuals from a clinical assessment. For each individual, am I dealing with approx 20000 datapoints (different number of recordings for each individual), which definitely restricts myself to a sparse implementation. In addition to this, there also seemes that I need an input dependent noise model, hence the heteroskedasticity.
I have fitted a hetero-sparse model as in this notebook example, but I am not sure how to scale it to perform the hierarchical learning. Any ideas would be welcome :)

https://github.com/mattramos/SparseHGP may be helpful. This repo is gives GPFlow2 code for modelling a sparse hierarchical model. Note, there are still some rough edges in the implementation that require an expensive for loop to be constructed.

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Poorly calibrated probabilities but good classification in confusion matrix

I have an imbalanced data set. My goal is to balance sensitivity and specificity via the confusion matrix. I used glmnet in r with class weights. The model does well at balancing the sensitivity/specificity, but I looked at the calibration plot, and the probabilities are not well calibrated. I have read about calibrating probabilities, but I am wondering if it matters if my goal is to produce class predictions. If it does matter, I have not found a way to calibrate the probabilities when using caret::train().
This topic has been widely discussed, especially in some answers by Stephan Kolassa. I will try to summarize the main take-home messages for your specific question.
From a pure statistical point of view your interest should be on producing as output a probability for each class of any new data instance. As you deal with unbalanced data such probabilities can be small which however - as long as they are correct - is not an issue. Of course, some models can give you poor estimates of the class probabilities. In such cases, the calibration allows you to better calibrate the probabilities obtained from a given model. This means that whenever you estimate for a new observation a probability p of belonging to the target class, then p is indeed its true probability to be of that class.
If you are able to obtain a good probability estimator, then balancing sensitivity or specificity is not part of the statistical part of your problem, but rather of the decision component. Such the final decision will likely need to use some kind of threshold. Depending on the costs of type I and II errors, the cost-optimal threshold might change; however, an optimal decision might also include more than one threshold.
Ultimately, you really have to be careful about which is the specific need of the end-user of your model, because this is what is going to determine the best way of taking decisions using it.

Can linear model give more prediction accuracy than random forest,decision tree,neural network?

I have calculated the following parameters after applying the following algorithms on a dataset from kaggle
enter image description here
In the above case,linear model is giving the best results.
Are the above results correct and can linear model actually give better results than other 3 in any case?
Or am I missing something?
According to AUC criterion this classification is perfect (1 is theoretical maximum). This means a clear difference in the data. In this case, it makes no sense to talk about differences in the results of methods. Another point is that you can play with methods parameters (you likely will get slightly different results) and other methods can become better. But real result will be indistinguishable. Sophisticated methods are invented for sophisticated data. This is not the case.
All models are wrong, some are useful. - George Box
In terms of classification, a model would be effective as long as it could nicely fit the classification boundaries.
For binary classification case, supposing your data is perfectly linearly separable, then linear model will do the job - actually the "best" job since any more complicated models won't perform better.
If your +'s and -'s are somehow a bit scattered when they cannot be separated by a line (actually hyperplane), then linear model could be beaten by decision tree simply because decision trees can provide classification boundary of more complex shape (cubes).
Then random forest may beat decision tree as classification boundary of random forest is more flexible.
However, as we mentioned early, linear model still has its time.

Shouldn't we take average of n models in cross validation in linear regression?

I have a question regarding cross validation in Linear regression model.
From my understanding, in cross validation, we split the data into (say) 10 folds and train the data from 9 folds and the remaining folds we use for testing. We repeat this process until we test all of the folds, so that every folds are tested exactly once.
When we are training the model from 9 folds, should we not get a different model (may be slightly different from the model that we have created when using the whole dataset)? I know that we take an average of all the "n" performances.
But, what about the model? Shouldn't the resulting model also be taken as the average of all the "n" models? I see that the resulting model is same as the model which we created using whole of the dataset before cross-validation. If we are considering the overall model even after cross-validation (and not taking avg of all the models), then what's the point of calculating average performance from n different models (because they are trained from different folds of data and are supposed to be different, right?)
I apologize if my question is not clear or too funny.
Thanks for reading, though!
I think that there is some confusion in some of the answers proposed because of the use of the word "model" in the question asked. If I am guessing correctly, you are referring to the fact that in K-fold cross-validation we learn K-different predictors (or decision functions), which you call "model" (this is a bad idea because in machine learning we also do model selection which is choosing between families of predictors and this is something which can be done using cross-validation). Cross-validation is typically used for hyperparameter selection or to choose between different algorithms or different families of predictors. Once these chosen, the most common approach is to relearn a predictor with the selected hyperparameter and algorithm from all the data.
However, if the loss function which is optimized is convex with respect to the predictor, than it is possible to simply average the different predictors obtained from each fold.
This is because for a convex risk, the risk of the average of the predictor is always smaller than the average of the individual risks.
The PROs and CONs of averaging (vs retraining) are as follows
PROs: (1) In each fold, the evaluation that you made on the held out set gives you an unbiased estimate of the risk for those very predictors that you have obtained, and for these estimates the only source of uncertainty is due to the estimate of the empirical risk (the average of the loss function) on the held out data.
This should be contrasted with the logic which is used when you are retraining and which is that the cross-validation risk is an estimate of the "expected value of the risk of a given learning algorithm" (and not of a given predictor) so that if you relearn from data from the same distribution, you should have in average the same level of performance. But note that this is in average and when retraining from the whole data this could go up or down. In other words, there is an additional source of uncertainty due to the fact that you will retrain.
(2) The hyperparameters have been selected exactly for the number of datapoints that you used in each fold to learn. If you relearn from the whole dataset, the optimal value of the hyperparameter is in theory and in practice not the same anymore, and so in the idea of retraining, you really cross your fingers and hope that the hyperparameters that you have chosen are still fine for your larger dataset.
If you used leave-one-out, there is obviously no concern there, and if the number of data point is large with 10 fold-CV you should be fine. But if you are learning from 25 data points with 5 fold CV, the hyperparameters for 20 points are not really the same as for 25 points...
CONs: Well, intuitively you don't benefit from training with all the data at once
There are unfortunately very little thorough theory on this but the following two papers especially the second paper consider precisely the averaging or aggregation of the predictors from K-fold CV.
Jung, Y. (2016). Efficient Tuning Parameter Selection by Cross-Validated Score in High Dimensional Models. International Journal of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, 10(1), 19-25.
Maillard, G., Arlot, S., & Lerasle, M. (2019). Aggregated Hold-Out. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.04890.
The answer is simple: you use the process of (repeated) cross validation (CV) to obtain a relatively stable performance estimate for a model instead of improving it.
Think of trying out different model types and parametrizations which are differently well suited for your problem. Using CV you obtain many different estimates on how each model type and parametrization would perform on unseen data. From those results you usually choose one well suited model type + parametrization which you will use, then train it again on all (training) data. The reason for doing this many times (different partitions with repeats, each using different partition splits) is to get a stable estimation of the performance - which will enable you to e.g. look at the mean/median performance and its spread (would give you information about how well the model usually performs and how likely it is to be lucky/unlucky and get better/worse results instead).
Two more things:
Usually, using CV will improve your results in the end - simply because you take a model that is better suited for the job.
You mentioned taking the "average" model. This actually exists as "model averaging", where you average the results of multiple, possibly differently trained models to obtain a single result. Its one way to use an ensemble of models instead of a single one. But also for those you want to use CV in the end for choosing reasonable model.
I like your thinking. I think you have just accidentally discovered Random Forest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_forest
Without repeated cv your seemingly best model is likely to be only a mediocre model when you score it on new data...

Clustering Algorithm for average energy measurements

I have a data set which consists of data points having attributes like:
average daily consumption of energy
average daily generation of energy
type of energy source
average daily energy fed in to grid
daily energy tariff
I am new to clustering techniques.
So my question is which clustering algorithm will be best for such kind of data to form clusters ?
I think hierarchical clustering is a good choice. Have a look here Clustering Algorithms
The more simple way to do clustering is by kmeans algorithm. If all of your attributes are numerical, then this is the easiest way of doing the clustering. Even if they are not, you would have to find a distance measure for caterogical or nominal attributes, but still kmeans is a good choice. Kmeans is a partitional clustering algorithm... i wouldn't use hierarchical clustering for this case. But that also depends on what you want to do. you need to evaluate if you want to find clusters within clusters or they all have to be totally apart from each other and not included on each other.
Take care.
1) First, try with k-means. If that fulfills your demand that's it. Play with different number of clusters (controlled by parameter k). There are a number of implementations of k-means and you can implement your own version if you have good programming skills.
K-means generally works well if data looks like a circular/spherical shape. This means that there is some Gaussianity in the data (data comes from a Gaussian distribution).
2) if k-means doesn't fulfill your expectations, it is time to read and think more. Then I suggest reading a good survey paper. the most common techniques are implemented in several programming languages and data mining frameworks, many of them are free to download and use.
3) if applying state-of-the-art clustering techniques is not enough, it is time to design a new technique. Then you can think by yourself or associate with a machine learning expert.
Since most of your data is continuous, and it reasonable to assume that energy consumption and generation are normally distributed, I would use statistical methods for clustering.
Such as:
Gaussian Mixture Models
Bayesian Hierarchical Clustering
The advantage of these methods over metric-based clustering algorithms (e.g. k-means) is that we can take advantage of the fact that we are dealing with averages, and we can make assumptions on the distributions from which those average were calculated.

Matlab: K-means clustering with predefined populations

I am trying to differentiate two populations. Each population is an NxM matrix in which N is fixed between the two and M is variable in length (N=column specific attributes of each run, M=run number). I have looked at PCA and K-means for differentiating the two, but I was curious of the best practice.
To my knowledge, in K-means, there is no initial 'calibration' in which the clusters are chosen such that known bimodal populations can be differentiated. It simply minimizes the distance and assigns the data to an arbitrary number of populations. I would like to tell the clustering algorithm that I want the best fit in which the two populations are separated. I can then use the fit I get from the initial clustering on future datasets. Any help, example code, or reading material would be appreciated.
-R
K-means and PCA are typically used in unsupervised learning problems, i.e. problems where you have a single batch of data and want to find some easier way to describe it. In principle, you could run K-means (with K=2) on your data, and then evaluate the degree to which your two classes of data match up with the data clusters found by this algorithm (note: you may want multiple starts).
It sounds to like you have a supervised learning problem: you have a training data set which has already been partitioned into two classes. In this case k-nearest neighbors (as mentioned by #amas) is probably the approach most like k-means; however Support Vector Machines can also be an attractive approach.
I frequently refer to The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition (Springer Series in Statistics) by Trevor Hastie (Author), Robert Tibshirani (Author), Jerome Friedman (Author).
It really depends on the data. But just to let you know K-means does get stuck at local minima so if you wanna use it try running it from different random starting points. PCA's might also be useful how ever like any other spectral clustering method you have much less control over the clustering procedure. I recommend that you cluster the data using k-means with multiple random starting points and c how it works then you can predict and learn for each the new samples with K-NN (I don't know if it is useful for your case).
Check Lazy learners and K-NN for prediction.